SHE WAS DOWN TO three hundred dollars by the time she got to Istanbul two weeks later. The city was a strange and beautiful place, one that scared her because of the hard way people looked into her face whenever she begged in the street.

Most of her remaining money disappeared with the series of random trucks she took through Greece, then along the Adriatic coast, through Albania, Montenegro and Croatia, past a shining spring sea, past lush green fields of vines and vegetables. And wrecked buildings slowly being brought back to life. She could speak a little Italian. It was the one European language the school had taught, simply because it was the only one for which they had the books. She loved the sound, too, and the pictures on the pages, of a distant city where the streets and squares had beautiful names, beautiful buildings.

The locals on the coast knew Italian. It was a language from the West, worth understanding in the hope its good fortune might touch you one day. She talked to them a little, knew the signs, understood the looks in some of the old men’s faces. There’d been a war here too.

She gave the last hundred dollars to a burly German, who drove her over the border into Italy at Trieste, and left her, two days later, penniless, on the outskirts of Rome.

The money hadn’t covered everything. Somewhere along the way-she wasn’t sure of the day, it hadn’t seemed important to keep track of the time-she’d turned thirteen. She knew about ways to keep men happy, and tried to tell herself it was easy when you lay there to think of something else: poppies waving in the yellow corn, bread baking over burning wood, pictures of the unknown city now only a few kilometres away, with its lovely buildings, its wealth, its promise of safety and happiness. And the sound of her father’s voice, singing in the fields. That was the warmest memory, one that she prayed would never disappear.

And when it was over, when he’d let her out of the cab on some grim housing estate in the suburbs, a place of dark, threatening streets-nothing like the Rome she’d imagined-she’d made a decision. Stealing was better than this. Stealing allowed her a little personal dignity. It would keep her alive until… what?

BACK ON THAT WARM DAY in early summer she hadn’t known the answer to that question. Now, in December, with Rome shivering under a vicious and unexpected burst of snow, she was no closer to it. Each day was a new battle fought using the same weapons: keen eyes, agile hands. The charities had thrown her out for stealing. The street people rejected her because she wouldn’t stoop to the tricks they used-selling themselves, selling dope. She was a world away from a home that no longer existed, alone in an empty piazza in the heart of Rome, looking at something that could only be a temple, one almost as old as some of those back in the place she now struggled to think of as home.

She’d followed the man all the way from the narrow street near the Spanish Steps, after she saw him leave a doorway next to a small store selling Gucci. He looked interesting somehow. The right type. So she’d followed him, and it wasn’t easy. He kept ducking out of the way as if he was hiding too. Then she lost him again, turned the corner, found herself in the square. The temple was a kind of sanctuary, she thought.

The girl stared at the huge doors shut tightly against the freezing blast and wondered what the place was like inside.

A sanctuary could be warm. It could have something to steal.

She walked along to the side of the building, under the shadow of the gigantic pillars and the curious writing above them, down a low path towards the light in a narrow side entrance.

The door was ajar. Snow was dancing around her like a wraith caught in the hushed breath of a newborn storm. She walked into a small, modern cubicle, which led into the dark, airy interior beyond, hearing voices. A man and a woman, foreign, American probably, were making sounds she didn’t quite understand.

She was cold. She was curious. She slunk into the shadows, somewhat in awe of the building’s size and majesty, slid behind a fluted column, then let her eyes adjust to the scene in the centre, lit by the moonlight spilling through a giant, open disc at the highest point of the roof.

Close by, thrown on a bench, lay a man’s coat and jacket. They looked good quality. There could be any amount of money in there, enough to see her through until the snow disappeared.

The two people inside were some distance away. The woman’s clothes were strewn across the geometric stone pattern of the floor. She lay naked in the very centre of the hall. Quite still now, her arms and legs outstretched in an odd, artificial manner, as if each limb were pointing to an invisible angle somewhere in the circular building.

It was wrong to watch. Laila understood that, but her mind fought to interpret what was happening in front of her in the icy, airy heart of this strange, dead place. She thought she had seen everything the world had to offer back in Iraq. Then something caught the moonlight. Something sharp and silver and terrifying, a slender line of surgical metal, hovering over the figure on the floor. And she knew she was mistaken.

THE TWO PLAINCLOTHES COPS HUDDLED IN THE DOORWAY of a closed farmacia in Via del Corso, shivering, teeth chattering, watching Mauro Sandri, the fat little photographer from Milan, fumble with the two big Nikon SLRs dangling round his neck. It was five days before Christmas and for once Rome was enjoying snow, real snow, deep and crisp and even, the kind you normally only saw on the TV when some surprise blizzard engulfed those poor miserable bastards living in the north.

It fell from the black sky as a perfect, silky cloud. Thick flakes curled around the gaudy coloured lights of the street decorations in a soft, white embrace. The pavements were already blanketed in a crunchy, shoe-deep covering in spite of the milling crowds who had pounded the Corso’s black stones a few hours earlier, searching for last-minute Christmas presents in the stores.

Nic Costa and Gianni Peroni had read the met briefing before they went on duty that evening. They’d looked at the words “severe weather warning” and tried to remember what that meant. Floods maybe. Gales that brought down some of the ancient tiles which sat so unsteadily on the rooftops of the centro storico, the warren of streets and alleys in the city’s Renaissance quarter where the two men spent most of their working lives. But this was different. The met men said it would snow and snow and snow. Snow in a way it hadn’t for almost twenty years, since the last big freeze in 1985. Only for longer this time, a week or more. And the temperatures would hit new lows too. Maybe it was global warming. Maybe it was just a trick throw of the meteorological dice. Whatever the reason, the world was about to become seriously out of sync for a little while and that knowledge, shared among the two and a half million or more individuals who lived within the boundaries of the Comune di Roma, was both scary and tantalizing. The city was braced for its first white Christmas in living memory and already the consequences of this were beginning to seep into the Roman consciousness. People were preparing to bunk off work for any number of sound and incontrovertible reasons. They’d picked up the nasty virus that was creeping through the city. They couldn’t take the buses in from the suburbs because, even if they made it through the dangerous, icy streets, who knew if they’d get back in the evening? Life was, for once, just too perilous to do anything but stay at home, or maybe wander down to the local bar and talk about nothing except the weather.

And they were all, librarian and shop assistant, waiter and tour guide, priest and shivering cop, thinking secretly: This is wonderful. Because for once Christmas would be a holiday. For once the city would step off the constantly moving escalator of modern life, remember to take a deep breath, close its eyes and sleep a little, all under that gorgeous ermine coverlet that kept falling in a constant white cloud, turning the black stones of the empty streets the colour of icing sugar.